OpenAI launches Frontier in bid to win more business customers

OpenAI on Thursday announced a new enterprise platform called Frontier, its latest launch as part of an effort to win more commercial customers.

Frontier acts as an intelligence layer that brings together disparate systems and data within an organization. OpenAI said the platform will make it easier for companies to manage, deploy and create AI agents, which are tools that can independently complete tasks on behalf of the user.

“Frontier is really an acknowledgment that we’re not going to build everything ourselves,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, told reporters during a briefing. “We will work with the ecosystem to build alongside them and embrace the fact that businesses will need many different partners.”

OpenAI has been making an aggressive push into the enterprise space in recent years, and in November announced: 1 million Business customers around the world use the company’s technology.

Last month, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that enterprise customers make up about 40% of OpenAI’s business, but she expects that number to approach 50% by the end of the year.

The company said OpenAI’s new Frontier platform is “complementary” to its existing business offerings, including ChatGPT Enterprise.

“What is still missing for most companies is a simple way to unlock the power of agents as teammates who can work within the business without having to reorganize everything underneath,” Denise Dresser, chief revenue officer at OpenAI, said during the briefing. “That’s why we built Frontier.”

OpenAI declined to share pricing details of the platform.

Frontier is compatible with agents created by OpenAI, agents created by businesses themselves, as well as agents from third parties. Google, Microsoft and Anthropic. Simo said it’s not possible for OpenAI to “build every AI agent that companies need.”

OpenAI said the platform connects siled internal applications, ticketing tools and data warehouses, enabling agents to access “shared business context” within an organization.

In this context, AI agents will be able to perform complex tasks and reason on data in an open agent execution environment, according to a blog post. This means that employees in a company can have agents in using tools on the computer, running code, and working with files, for example.

OpenAI said Frontier also includes built-in tools to help agents improve over time to evaluate and optimize their performance.

“What we’re basically doing is turning agents into true AI colleagues,” Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s general manager of business-to-business, told reporters.

Zoph Rejoined OpenAI In January, after he abruptly left Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup he co-founded with Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former CTO.

OpenAI said Frontier is initially launching to a small group of customers. Early users include organizations such as: UberState Farm, Intuition And Thermo Fisherman. The company said wider availability will come in the next few months.

WRISTWATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar